A span is the building block of a trace and is a named, timed operation that represents a piece of the workflow in the distributed system.

What is a span in logging?

A Span is the basic building block of a Trace. A Trace is made up of a tree of Spans, starting with a Root Span (i.e. Span with no parent), which encapsulates the end-to-end time that it takes to accomplish a task.

What is trace span?

A trace is a collection of operations that represents a unique transaction handled by an application and its constituent services. A span represents a single operation within a trace.